Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

ndogg writes "There is no longer any uncertainty surrounding the release of Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux. It's official: the port is now dead. No reasons were given, but no one should be waiting for it anymore, if anyone still was."

Reason. Linux users refuse to pay for their software so it's not worth targeting it as a platform.

Reason: Ports are years late and often cost more than the original launch price while the Windows version is already in the bargain bin. A rational being will realize that the 30£ = ~$47 [linuxgamepublishing.com] vs 5$ [amazon.com] will very soon pay for a Windows license, hell even a dedicated Windows PC if you game a little. I'd love to buy more Linux versions, but not at such a craptastic value.

Well, that's a coincidence: It's officially dead for Windows too. And has been since almost three months after launch.

I really liked the Unreal Tournament games (even though I'm an id Software fanboy), and definitely the first part was a lot better than its counterpart at the time; Quake 3. Whereas Quake 3 had obvious masterlike AI-bots, the AI in Unreal Tournament always seemed to resemble a bit more humanlike play-style.
UT2004 was great too, and had some awesome new gametypes, which really worked well. They were planning on releasing a new update for it every year (hence the 2004 addition to the title), but failed at doing that (probably because they discovered their new cash cow; Gears of War).
Unreal Tournament 3's figures were very bad: Already after a month of release, the servers got less and less. As of today there's only a handfull of servers left (for the UK at least), with even less players.
I must admit myself that I also didn't play UT3 as much as I played the previous titles.

So to be honest, I can't really see too much of a loss in this (except that it would have been easier for other Unreal engined games to be ported over to Linux).

Total revenue right now is $861,710.88, let's say $850k. Linux users are just under a quarter of that, let's say 22%. So Linux users are responsible for $187k. The average Linux contribution is $13.61, so that's circa 13700 Linux buyers. Of note, the top contributor paid $2k, so no one Linux user is accountable for the vast majority of the $187k or anything like that. With sample size that large you can be pretty sure the numbers are meaningful.

The same calculations say they have about 75400 Windows buyers and about 22200 OSX buyers. So Linux makes up 12% of the userbase and 22% of the revenue (ish, guesstimating a bit by the graph), OSX makes up 20% of the userbase and 22% of the revenue, and Windows makes up 68% of the userbase and 56% of the revenue. Doesn't sound to me like any of the three OSes are worth ignoring at all. Not to mention the game developers are saying that Linux ports are more than paying for themselves.

Fact one: as of *right now* the total number of purchases is about 116,000.Fact two: as of *right now*, the *largest* contribution was only $2000 dollars. (The top ten contributions are listed, and they go down quickly from that $2000 figure - #10 is currently $500, so by definition, all the remaining contributions are less than $500, unless the statistics they are reporting are outright lies. It is very likely that the vast majority of users would be donating less than $100.)Fact three: as of *right now*, the total sales volume in dollars is $869,711

Put all the facts together, and you get a picture that the $869,000 was raised through a LOT of fairly small contributions. Or, at least, no ONE SINGLE donator made a large enough contribution to significantly throw off the averages. In order for one person to throw it off, they would need to make a donation many orders of magnitude larger (say $100,000-200,000), but that is *simply* not the case since we know the largest donation was only $2000.

It would really behoove you, when the GGP says to go look at the statistics on humblebundle.com, to actually GO LOOK AT THE STATISTICS, instead of making posts which show you obviously didn't bother to look over them at all, instead preferring to make specious arguments that are directly contradicted by the data HAD YOU BOTHERED TO LOOK FIRST.

Dunno, but I'd sure like to ask the devs of Torchlight that question. Why intentionaly exclude a Linux port considering they used a cross-platform engine? It blows the mind.

Granted, it later turned out to run ok under Wine... but in the meantime I was undecided and waited until the game was up on offer for $5. If there was a native Linux port I'd have payed the full $20 from the start. That's $15 they cheated themselves out of. All this while most indy devs out there would be aghast at the thought of throwing $15 out the window like that.